July 2007

07/28/2007

Niall Ferguson, a Harvard professor from across the pond, writes in the Sunday Telegraph that he's having to dig deeper in his pockets to taste the Philadelphia cheesesteak.

The historian, in a piece on population growth and food production,notes:

When I wanted a Philly cheese steak in the States last week, I had to pay through the nose. That's because cheese inflation is 4 per cent, steak inflation is 6 per cent and bread inflation is 10 per cent. (American steak is now 53 per cent dearer than it was 10 years ago.)

07/27/2007

When you count yourself the sum of 11 counties, you can find lots to cheer about. The heart of the Phillies may have just broken, but Greater Philadelphia still can celebrate the region's latest rankings in Forbes, Money, US News & World Report and the Places Rated Almanac.

I'm still trying to figure out what's so hot about Horsham, having spent two years working in a faceless industrial park in that Athens of the norther suburbs.

07/26/2007

It was great to see Will Bunch on national TV last night, affirming to hear Keith Olbermann describe the Daily News senior writer as author of a "superb online blog" and fascinating to hear Mr. Attytood poke holes in the connection between terror and cheese.

More curious was the revelation that in 1975, Olbermann was senior editor at the Hackley School newspaper in Tarrytown, N.Y. while Bunch was a cub reporter. At the end of his Countdown segmentOlbermann ran a screen shot of an edition of that sheet in which both angry young men earned bylines.

Hackley School? Isn't that where Brooks Brothers and Ralph Lauren shoot some of their catalogues? Didn't Malcolm Forbes go there? George Hamilton? Next we'll learn Will lathers Grey Poupon on his pretzels.

07/25/2007

Every few months I try to call up a dead link on my list of "favorites," hoping to be surprised by some activity in a shuttered Web site. I'll play Rbally, to see if the music blogger's gone back to posting great shows from rock's golden ages.

And I'll drop by the Whiskey Bar, to see if the blogger named Billmon's ended his long drought to again show the way out of our current political troubles.

I wish I could report Billmon's return. (Or Rbally's for that matter.) We have to settle for second best:

Someone's put together an archive of Whiskey Bar's most essential pours -- his incisive posts on the Iraq war. The ones that show once again what happens when you combine journalistic chops (he used to be a reporter) with a sense of outrage over the way our goverment operates (just because there are two sides to a story doesn't make them equal). It may or not be Billmon who built the archive. Interesting speculation here, at All-Spin Zone.

My favorite blogger shuttered his place the end of last year. For months just error messages came up when you called up his site. Now there's a way to re-read some of the posts that put him at the front of the pack. Maybe it's been up a while; I found it when I Googled, "Whiskey Bar." He's also got archives of a few more subjects, with titles such as "Come to Daddy," "Comrade Webb," and "Winners & Losers." It's only a taste, but it's still top shelf.

07/08/2007

I like the way Phawker noted this MAJOR DEVELOPMENT with 4:37 a.m. clarity:

"BREAKING: The War Just Ended With An Anonymous Source Trial Balloon Floated In The New York Times."

David Sanger reports that White House officials fear Republican support for the war has crumbled to the point the president must get the jump on critics and announce a pullback from Iraq's most dangerous quarters.

“When you count up the votes that we’ve lost and the votes we’re likely to lose over the next few weeks, it looks pretty grim,” said one senior official, who, like others involved in the discussions, would not speak on the record about internal White House deliberations.

07/07/2007

Clever, those kids at Philly.com. Restore Blinq to an honored spot on the Philly.com blogroll, and maybe they can get some more new tricks from this old hound. Not sure what I have to say, since my blog reading has been more avocational than vocational lately. That's no so bad, though. So, here's what's been on my screen.

Jon Pareles' blog in the New York Times, which I checked out mainly to learn the identity of the fawning, preening softboy with asymmetrical hair (AFI?) that I turned off so quickly during Bravo's breakfast, lunch and dinner with Live Earth. What I did see: A spirited Crowded House set from Sydney with some smart ad-libbing by Neil Finn; a dozen? gold-clad Chinese sirens playing a funked up Mozart's 40th on primitive strings; Al Gore's remedial clapping; Red Hot Chili Peppers,but mainly to figure out if that was Will Ferrell on drums. No, silly. He could nail down the beat.

Speaking of nailing it ... Inquirer editor David Sullivan continues advancing the cause of that thing that we do. Basically, he argues, there's a lot more fight left in newspapers, and we need to get great at that which we do best. Whether or not that continues to be distributed on fishwrap remains to be seen. He writes from the trenches:

Readers have told us for years that they don’t have time to read the whole paper. A sorry excuse, we respond; look at all we do for you? If we could, we’d give you even more to read, and you darn well better be grateful. After all, everyone we know reads the New York Times. Does anyone we know ever say the New York Times should be smaller?

Something else that crossed my desk, a from-the-right evisceration of Howard Eskin.Instapunk wrote of WIP-AM's Wolfman:

Eskin's only real expertise is in-depth knowledge of Philadelphia's teams and their histories. This he gets from being a born Philadelphian (nobody can mangle the pronunciation of the letter "P" -- as in 'WIP' -- like a Philly native). He also has learned the mysterious feature of talk radio Phil Hendrie has exploited to become a cult phenomenon. The people who call in to a radio show are a tiny subset of those who listen, and the callers will keep calling and keep being as stupid as you dare them to be. Eskin's bread-and-butter fans would never call him because his whole shtick is torturing callers for the entertainment of those who listen for the easy pleasure of feeling smart; i.e., smarter than the tireless victims who don't ever get the joke. Unlike Hendrie's application of this principle, which is creative, funny, and sometimes inspired, Eskin's exploitation of dim bulbs is akin to masturbation. His whole act is designed to solicit calls only from the dumbest rocks in the box, and putting them down strokes his own insecure ego on a continuous basis.

Finally, a five-year-old article from the Stanford Daily about "the truer sound" of Uncle Tupelo. And speaking of great, gone bands, a Trip Shakespeare page with concert footage and promotional goodies.

07/02/2007

The lefty lobes of the Philadelphia blogosphere suffered a tremendous loss last night. Jim Capozzola, author of The Rittenhouse Review, died after a long illness. He was 44.

He was a pioneer of the new medium, starting just before brother in arms, Atrios, in April 2002. He once told former Inky staffer Beth Gillin, "One doesn't blog for other people. One blogs for oneself. Plain and simple."

Jim blogged plainly and simply about his bulldog, Mildred, and his misadventures with Bonsai plants. He tilted at a few windmills, and cared passionately about his city.

If you go to his blog, you'll see he last posted on March 14, a jab at the Attorney General and the "Saturday Night Massacre."

Remembrances are rolling in. At the All-Spin Zone, Richard Cranium did the honor:

Deadpan is one word I could use. Intelligent to a fault. Angst ridden. Passionate. Searching. Always reading something. Jimmy was a guy who had been through the worst that life could throw at him, but still maintained a finely-honed sense of humor.

At Suburban Guerrilla, Susy Madrak recalled her friend, calling Jim "my fairy blogfather." He gave her technical advice as she began her site, and offered some career-building lessons, such as "pick a fight with a blogger who's much better known - you can't believe how well it works."

I don't remember him for his fights. I remember him for pieces like this one, from Nov. 25, 2002, called "Al Gore and the Alpha Girls." It won him a Koufax Award, for liberal blog writing. The subtitle was "The Enduring Power of Cliques in a Post-High-School World." It compared cool girls at his old school with the media that manhandled the vice president.

Lassooing a group of A-listers, which ran from Ann Coulter and Maureen Dowd to Frank Rich and George Will, Jim wrote:

When the subject is Al Gore, each of the pundits named here, each member of this gaggle of giggling geese can be counted upon to reveal him- or herself to be the quintessential 17-year-old Alpha Girl: immature, insecure, dishonest, manipulative, selfish, developmentally stunted, and desperate for the approval and affection of others.

These are the players. These are the purveyors and shapers of opinion today. Enjoy, America, this is your media.

Susie Madrak gave him a lovingly tart send-off. She left us with this picture:

I once met him for lunch when he walked in wearing a Walkman. This intrigued me, because he never, everlistened to popular music. “What are you listening to?” I said, pulling at the headphones.

“I’m teaching myself Dutch,” he said, almost apologetically.

He was also an impeccable dresser who used to work on Wall Street, and he absolutely adored Philadelphia, his adopted city. He made a mean marinara. And because he was the product of a mixed marriage (Irish and Italian), he was both romantic and brilliantly sarcastic. (Jim sometimes said he couldn’t wait to hear what people said about him at his wake.) Oh, and he loved musical comedies....

He could be a pain in the ass, but in such an interesting way. The world is so much less scintillating without him in it.